Non-Disney Entertainment
Topic: My Kid Could Paint That

#	Author	Message
31	Ursula Wed 5/7/2008 9:02a	<<<So, just to pry a bit more, because the 'anyone can do that' amuses me.>>> Okay, I'll bite. You'll be surprised by my answers. <<<Is it the modern art that you're suggestion 'anyone' can do?>>> Yes. <<<So that 'real' art is someone who can paint a tree, and it really look like a tree.>>> No. The splatters I do is art. As is modern art. As is the masters I love to gaze at when I visit the Huntington. Both are art. It is all art to me. I feel that people need to express themselves however they feel. I am not implying that modern art with the splatters is any less of an art form than what Gainsborough has created. I even went to college with a brilliant artist. He could easily sketch out a perfect tree in less than an hour. But, he preferred the passion and outlet that doing more modern art gave him, so he followed that path instead. I think the only difference is that even though I can make little bits of modern art, I can't sketch a tree to save my life. (Brown stick, meet green ball.)
32	Ursula Wed 5/7/2008 9:05a	<<<Could the architecture of Disneyland be considered art?>>> Yes, it is. <<<Is the structure of Space Mountain an example of artistic beauty, or just popular kitsch?>>> Yes. ;) It happens to be both, well, in my opinion. I hate having to always say "in my opinion. Who else's thoughts would I be writing save my own? <<Is 'Citizen Kane' considered art?>> Yes. <<While 'Iron Man' is just digital pablum?>>> No. Have you seen his suit? That is art. Film is a form of art, even if it is just my silly home movies.
33	Kar2oonMan Wed 5/7/2008 9:07a	We recently visited an art gallery. My son (surprisingly, to me) was drawn to abstract work that had a lot of bold strokes, and seemed to suggest movement with big swooshes of paint. He didn't care a bit about looking at the paintings that were more realistic. There is always the feeling, I think, that the abstract artist is putting one over on people. I know I've often felt that way. Especially once the work starts selling for thousands of dollars, and people start layering in all sorts of meaning onto splatters and swooshes. In some ways, I think talking about art is tough because I believe everyone has a true, gut reaction to a particular work of art. They may love it, be repelled by it, be bored by it, be confused by it. Whatever this reaction is, it is instant and uncontrollable. It's almost like smelling something -- something may smell delicious or hideous, provoke warm feelings of comfort or a gag reflex. It's that initial gut reaction, I think, that most artists go for. Once people start attempting to verbalize or justify why they like or dislike a particular work of art, other stuff starts to seep in. "Will I sound like a rube if I say I don't understand this paint splattered on an oil drum?" "Will I sound pretentious if I say that this glass of water with a toothpick in it makes me think of classic Americana?" I think if people go with that first, initial, very real reaction to something, then that's the best way to "judge" a particular work of art. What this film gets at is that people in the world of art tend to ignore that. They wanted the art because it was an investment. If they liked it when they thought a 4 year old painted it, why wouldn't they like it if there were doubts about that? If the art truly spoke to them, the age of the artist really shouldn''t have mattered.
34	Ursula Wed 5/7/2008 9:09a	So, Jim said, "Wow...Could not disagree more." This was about my thoughts on Warhol. Would you please then explain your opinion? I said,"...wasn't Andy Warhol just doing a can of soup? Was that not his whole point of having art in every day things? Maybe I totally didn't get what he was going for in making art out of the every day. Was he making another statement that wooshed over my head. (I always thought he was making a mocking statement)." Seriously, I'd love to learn it from another point of view.
35	Goofyernmost Wed 5/7/2008 9:10a	>>>*sigh* I feel like I'm in my Art Appreciation 101 class 25 years ago. It cracks me up that some here feel they know what art is -- and what isn't! Right on, man. Keep on truckin'<<< With all due respect Jim, isn't that what you are doing? In my mind, in order for art to be ART it must show skill and definition. I cannot appreciate something that looks like a paint spill. That's just me. Obviously others find something appealing about it. I do believe that I could stand in front of a canvas, throw paint on it and, if I'm lucky have it be art. I would never be able to convince myself that it required skill and long suffering to do it. Because of that belief, I cannot appreciate that, so called, art. If a 4 year old can do it to that much acclaim, then that should prove that for all. All that being said...if a person likes it, appreciates it and finds a value in it then to them it is art. Just not to me. Trying to imply how unsophisticated I am for not just seeing it, will not alter the situation. I guess what I am trying to say is that it is one of the few things that is completely in the eye of the beholder. It cannot be dictated. If I see something as Art, then it is Art. If I don't then it is not. Art is an individual determination and cannot really be defined. JMHO.
36	Kar2oonMan Wed 5/7/2008 9:14a	>>If a 4 year old can do it to that much acclaim, then that should prove that for all.<< That is the central question, though, in "My Kid Could Paint That." Did a 4 year old really do those works of art? Or was she assited to achieve a more polished work?
37	Dabob2 Wed 5/7/2008 9:48a	Art, like beauty, is in the eye of the beholder, as far as I'm concerned. Though Mele certainly said it better. I remember thinking about this when I saw an exhibition of Cy Twombley at MoMA about 12 years ago. The work itself didn't appeal much to me; what I found fascinating were the explanations under the works, and the lengthy discussion in the catalog. Part of me really wanted to understand what he was going for in what looked to me like a lot of scribbles (usually). Part of me thought I must be missing something to think it WAS just a lot of scribbles. So I read, and read... and then part of me just said "no, I'm right. It is basically scribbles. This unbelievably pretentious pap I'm reading is just attempting to justify that." Then part of me said "Well, I don't know, maybe not. Don't want to be a philistine here..." See what you think. http://www.artnet.com/Gallerie...id=16910 http://www.artnet.com/Artists/...for_sale Now compare what you see to some comments I found on the googles... "When I first encountered Cy Twombly's work, in the form of a small show of works on paper at the Art Gallery of Ontario in 1982, I was staggered. And I do not use "staggered" as a figure of speech. I mean that I actually had to seek a bench in the dimly lit, empty gallery so I could recover from the turmoil into which the artwork had plunged me. What caused this had a much to do with what Twombly's notational drawings disclosed about an attitude toward the world as it did with what they proposed about the pictorial possibilities of the "writerly" gesture. Through these epistolary drawings/paintings I got a hint of what it means to possess an aristocractic spirit. Several of them consisted of little more than the artist's spastic signature scrawled large across a surface distressed and aged through repeated erasure and obliteration. Here, evidently, was an artist whose profound appreciation of his own oddness could transform the least promising, most awkward of gestures into the perfect expression of his superior grace and infallible sophistication. Years later, on the occasion of the retrospective which travelled from MOMA to MOCA I found confirmation of what I had surmised about Twombly's character in remarks attributed to the aritst's brother-in-law. Describing the young Twombly he met in 1957, Giorgio Franchetti called him "a natural aristocrat. . .very elegant, very handsome, very aloof. . ." and "He had to deal with Abstract Expressionism. Everyone in the late '50s and early '60s did; that came with the fact of being an American artist. But his solution was cunning: he created an irritably stylish version of Ab-Ex gesture, in which the all-over squiggles of Pollock got absorbed into the loopier, body-based rhythms of '40s De Kooning. In effect, he turned Pollock's rococo lacework into its cruder cousin, graffiti. Did this imply a degree of loss? Certainly; but loss (and a barely suppressed anger at it) is one of the chief themes of Twombly's art. Its model is the palimpsest, the document in which a later text effaces the earlier. Through his paintings trickles a current of double nostalgia - on the one hand, for the closed-off "heroic" possibilities of Modernism and, on the other, for the ancient Mediterranean world, experienced at a remove by living in modern Italy. Love (or its facsimile) among the ruins. Twombly will insert "dirty" bits in a painting - a little graffiti-style penis, odd smears of paint with the look of dried sperm - in the hope they will enhance some sense of a Baroque cityscape - but much of the time, they don't. Though lyrically involved with the Italian past, Twombly seldom quotes directly from its dead artists. An exception is Leonardo, whose temperament - combining a fastidious eye for minute incident with a pessimistic, even apocalyptic imagination - evidently intrigues him.The most successful trace is in Leda and the Swan, 1962, which enlarges the turbid vortices of the Deluge studies into a frenzy of scribbles and feathers, sexual and comic at the same time. In sum, Twombly is a textbook case of High and Low in one parcel: an Alexandrian painter in love with entropy and yet capable of toughness. He can summon a carnivalesque energy, as in Ferragosto IV, 1961. He enjoys the blooming and buzzing of nature, though his responses to it in recent years - evocations of the rural hill landscapes around his studio in Gaeta - are formulaic and hark back to Dubuffet and, earlier, to Soutine's Ceret paintings. The phrases he writes on the canvas are place names and snatches of poetry, done in a faint cursive script that is always on the point of trailing off into illegibility; they suggest fatigue and forgetting. But the structure of the paintings themselves, the placement of the marks on the big field, is energetic and often brilliant. " I'd like to be able to see all that in there... but I couldn't at MoMA, and I can't now. Part of me thinks I must be lacking somehow, but most of me thinks I'm seeing through the hype and pretension. What think you?
38	Ursula Wed 5/7/2008 10:00a	^ Those are scribbles. And yes, I was laughing as I saw them!!! I hope he made bank on them. I can't wait to hear what Jim's thoughts are on them!!!!
39	davewasbaloo Wed 5/7/2008 10:08a	It reminds me of the work by Tracy Emin that was valued at nearly $1m. It was a tent, and inside were post it notes with the names of guys she had slept with. Is that art? To some people, yes, enough to give it a $1m value. I wish I were that "artistic".
40	Jim in Merced CA Wed 5/7/2008 10:14a	Ursula, after your most recent posts, I think I understand where you're coming from. My point is that art is art is art. It is in the eye of the beholder -- which is what I believe. As for Andy Warhol -- to me, what he did was take popular advertising, and showcase it as 'art.' Sure, he may have been mocking the art world to some degree, but Warhol also paved the way for other types of art to be considered 'art.' I have Disneyland attractions posters framed and hanging in my home. I have two of the stretch portraits from The Haunted Mansion framed and hanging in my living room. One of the reasons this is done is due in large part to Andy Warhol. He legitimized advertising and popular art. Are the Disneyland attractions posters 'art'? To me they are. But I'm sure to others, it's just junk. So, I think we're in agreement here.

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